Why I'm Doing This

I hate writing. In college, essays were always the homework assignments that I pushed to the back burner; it would take considerably more fingers and toes than I possess to count the number of papers I completed while more responsible students were in bed. That procrastination is a bad habit that I’ve never outgrown—as a pastor, there’s never been a Sunday morning that I wasn’t still editing my sermon 30 minutes before the service started.

Any time I look at an old piece of my writing, I find 4 or 5 things that make me groan, wondering, “What was I thinking here?” And the older the writing, the more horrified I am at what I once thought was acceptable prose.

The writing process takes too long, editing is painful, and by the time I’ve finished the work, the feeling is less akin to pride than relief. Writing, more often than not, leaves me exhausted and empty.

Thing is, I also love writing. I don’t know how to build anything more complicated than a Target bookshelf, but constructing an essay has always been something that came naturally to me. Where math and science presented problems I had to solve, with right or wrong answers, writing challenged me to give my thoughts, and to let the quality of the argument and the writing determine its rightness or wrongness. Writing my ideas, instead of just thinking them or saying them, somehow makes them seem more organized, more substantive, and more thoughtful—maybe because in order for me to put those thoughts on paper, they have to be all of those things. My best thinking doesn’t come through in my writing; my best thinking is my writing.

So I’m both unlucky and lucky that a large part of my job is spent writing. I have to write a sermon every week, because come Sunday morning I either have something to say or I have to say something. Of my own volition, I put out a devotional every Friday. Add to that preparation for weekly Bible study, church newsletter articles, and a variety of more occasional assignments, and much of my week ends up being spent in front of a computer—mostly staring at a blank Word document waiting for inspiration to strike, but occasionally typing, occasionally enough that I’m still employed. All of that writing pushes me and drives me, empties me and fills me.

But when I’m “off the clock” (and for the record, no pastor ever truly is), I’m still thinking. Sometimes about faith, sometimes about family, sometimes about sports, sometimes about politics, sometimes about comics books, sometimes about the news of the day, sometimes about television, sometimes about what I’ve been reading, sometimes about something so random I can’t wait to tell somebody about that something. But when I’m thinking about those things, the things that don’t apply to Sunday’s sermon, I have no outlet. I can talk about it, sure, but whenever I do, I find that my enthusiasm tends to overpower my thoughtfulness. So instead of presenting my idea or my argument the way it sounds in my head, as something potentially worth hearing, it comes out jumbled. Words, so powerful when written deliberately, come out of my mouth too quickly for their own good and see their impact lessened as a result.

I want a space where I can put those words, those ideas, on paper, where I can erase a sentence here and move a paragraph there, where those thoughts that come out of my mouth as a muddled mess can come through my keyboard as something worth reading. And thanks to the Internet, such a space exists—it’s called a blog, and you’re reading it.

This will be a place for me to write about whatever’s on my mind. Sometimes that will be the kind of argument you’d normally hear at a sports bar, sometimes it’ll be a review of a book I just read, sometimes it’ll be a devotional thought. Sometimes I’ll address big, universally important issues, other times I’ll just give my two cents on a headline. And so sometimes you won’t care about the topic I’m addressing at all—no problem! This blog is not about drawing an audience, it’s simply about organizing my thoughts and practicing my writing. I’m not doing this because I want to impress you, I’m doing it to challenge myself.

That being said, these essays are being put in a public space for a reason: collaboration leads to better thinking and better writing. So feel free to comment, share, e-mail me, or just read. I’m going to keep writing regardless!

I know that maintaining this blog will be something I’ll hate some days, when I would rather shut down my brain and watch 30 minutes’ worth of YouTube videos than write. I know sometimes I’ll wonder what the point is of writing this stuff down, what I’m really accomplishing here. But I also know that it is writing—strong, eloquent, thoughtful, passionate writing—that has moved me more than any verbal argument ever has. And if I manage to stumble my way into writing something like that, then this blog will have been worth the trouble. I hope you will enjoy reading what is posted here—because as much as I hate it sometimes, ultimately I will love writing it.